Potholes and Stains on Memory Lane.

This place is full of memories.
The cherry tree my cousin and I used to sit in for hours, poised like gibbons to chatter and eat cherries until we were sick to groaning with stained lips and fingers.
My childhood dirtpile.
Imagination games with imaginary rabbits and talking critters in the tall trees where now only rotting stumps remain.

Plastic and silk flowers dustily honor ancestors in a lacquered shrine. 

Wood taps gong and fills the silence until that tiny moment it is gone. 

Memories of a child trying to summon a dead grandfather, quickly spinning around to see him before the tiny moment ended and the spell was gone.

Ghosts of root cellar and gardens grown over crumbled talcum powder dirt.

Sometimes the memories drive by you on the street but sometimes the other way around. 

Ivanohoe Road is a place I have driven by for 27 years.

I say “driven by” because I have not driven down it since 1984 and only this spring did I ride down it, later I drove it by myself and it wasn’t so bad.

Tonight was the first time I have driven that road at night since 1984 the night before my prom of my Junior year.

The night of the Junior Senior Banquet.

I was a different person then.

Of course, we are always different in our youth but what made me different then was not about age, the passing of time or fashion it was what happened on this night.

There have been two moments in my life that the universe somehow decided to teach me massive life lessons on a multitude of levels in a very short span of time. This is the second of those moments.

Lesson One: There are no guarantees.

The morning of that day, a very sweet friend experienced a teen tragedy, her boyfriend, her first real boyfriend had dumped her the day before prom and was taking some other girl with similar hair but apparently less scruples and friend was weeping.

We girls huddled around our friend like good friends do and like good friends do, worked on a solution.

Two of us skipped class (a hobby) and went to the house of a cute OLDER guy with a HOT CAR and explained the situation, within about 15 minutes went back to school with a date for our friend.

She was over the moon.

Tragedy-to-triumph. Fifteen minutes.

Happy days are here again.

After the Junior Senior Banquet, we were all heading out to Cow Hollow (yes really) for a big boozy blow out bash of epic proportions. I had switched cars with some boys since there were four of them, including THE DUMPER and three of us girls so we were driving another boy's pick up truck. We had been across the border to Idaho where the drinking age was 19 and the oldest looking of us had bought our usual starter kit for three teen girls in a small town: A bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 for each of us (I personally preferred the white grape) and a case of beer to split, to start off the night.

Booze is a hobby in ruralopolis, it goes so nicely with the other hobbies of fist fights and remorseful intercourse.

We had had some of the booze and were driving along having a fine time when our newly TRIUMPHANT friend whizzes by our little convoy with some of our other friends hooting and hollering and we cheer back because we know she is going to pass THE DUMPER with the boys ahead of us. We honked and waved.

Tragedy-to-triumph. Fifteen seconds.

It was all over.

Life as an after-school special.

She swerved in front of the boys, and her truck went off the road into a field, a common accident in a rural area, we all get out of our cars, laughing and running in the dust, ready to find a farmer with a tractor to help us just like our own dads help people out of our fields.

Still life with nightmare.

The dust is everywhere and our laughter is silent when we see the flotsam of wreckage all over the road and the bodies strewn everywhere. We hear moans and cries and a cold  hand grips my heart as the dust clears and we see..hell.

Or something hellish. Maybe it is just the hell in my head but there it stays.

In a city a call would be made and help would come in a few minutes but we were on a dark country road far, far from a town or hospital. Before cell phones and people still had party-lines. The time it took you to read that was much longer than the fraction of time before action occurred and lesson two began.

Lesson Two: You cannot predict who will freak out in an emergency.

The big blonde football hero? The guy who went on to be a doctor? Freaked out and became hysterical and screaming and drove off with my car like a maniac, my car with blankets, a pillow, a jacket. Things I resented not having later.

The big blonde football hero? The guy who went on to be a doctor?

THE DUMPER.

The rest of us bee-lined to people, I cannot explain why who went to who but we were each pulled in different directions, there was no discussion. One friend went for help at a farmhouse. There were six people in the truck. No seat belts.

The Prom Queen: Broken femur and a strip of skin the size of a large band-aid was missing from the middle of her beautiful forehead. She was the magically movie star beautiful daughter of a migrant worker family and had been a surprise victory election.

The Class Clown: Extreme shock, wandering the area with a dazed smile and about half of her head was scalped, the blood running in horrific rivers wending a macabre border around her large smile.

The Class Flirt: Extreme shock, walking about with a small hand injury, generally a person talking constantly is silenced and dazed.

The Best Athlete: Broken pelvis and internal injuries indicated by rapidly distended abdomen.

The Assistant Yearbook Editor: Broken pelvis, extreme traumatic head injury, coma, permanent brain damage of a massive nature, leaving him with the mental age of a 9 year old and a completely different personality.

The Triumphant Friend: Massive contusions, abrasions, broken bones and near complete detachment of mandible, snapped spine from being propelled through sun-roof. Died instantly.

I was taking care of our Best Athlete, I had to hold her down, I could tell she had internal injuries because her flat trim stomach was swelling to the point I had to unzip her pants. She was in incredible pain and wanted to stand, wanted to find out about the others.  The lower half of her body was angled in an odd way. Something was very wrong. I spent the hour and more convincing her it was the pain clouding her perception, only a few minutes had passed, the ambulance was almost here, almost here, almost here.

Why were they not here?

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Some facts.

The first, the truck had run off into the field but our friend had panicked and spun the wheel to drive back on the road, her bumper hit the irrigation ditch and the truck rolled end over end, flinging people and property in all directions.

The second, we had no idea our friend Triumphant was dead, we had each taken turns going over to her and spending time talking to her so she wasn’t alone. 
We all swore later we saw her breathing but they told us later she died instantly. Which is a mercy since half of her face, her beautiful sweet face with it’s kind smile and small dimple was gone and she lay in a large pool of blood, so large it ran across the spanch of country asphalt. When I spent my time with her, I tried so hard not to let it show that I wanted to scream, I kept my voice calm and soothing and told her the ambulance was coming


almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here. 


I sat with my friend under the starry sky and told her a story while unbeknownst to me I was telling myself a fiction as well.

We all swore later we could see her breathing.

The third, we only thought there were five people in the car.

The Assistant Yearbook Editor was in the back of the truck and we didn’t see him as the truck hollered by. We all ran to someone but no one ran to him until at least an hour had passed and one of us heard snorting. An animal? What makes a noise like that, we wondered aloud to each other. The noise grew louder and more pronounced, and he was found face down in the dirt way back in the field. He had been thrown from the truck when it went into the field, he hit a telephone pole and landed far away from the rest of the group, who were all on the road farther down.

We were waiting and waiting and no sign of an ambulance, someone went back to the farmhouse, they had thought it was a drunken joke and hadn’t called. They looked out the window and finally picked up the phone.

THE DUMPER came squealing back demanding to know where SHE was and why no one was here, the guy who had gone with him to handle his crazed self continued to handle him and calmed him down.

An ambulance finally came, an EMT asked me what was wrong with The Best Athlete and I told him, emphasizing her internal injuries and rapid swelling. When the ambulance left without her, taking the two who had been walking around and The Assistant Yearbook Editor but leaving my friend Triumphant on the asphalt, I grew angry but told my charge that the other ambulance was on it’s way.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

A boy I once loved but who no longer spoke to me in that way that teen dramas unfold was in this group of teen triage givers. He spoke to me that night for the first time in three years, softly with kinds eyes he mouthed to me over our injured friend so she would not hear “She’s gone.”

I looked at him and he helped me not to cry and I took a breath and turned back to my friend on the ground, we had found a blanket in my returned car and put it over her.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Then people began to arrive, curious onlookers and with them arrived my next lesson.

Lesson Three: You never really know people until you do and then you can’t un-know them.

More people arrived on the scene as we waited with our friends, keeping them calm and warm as we shivered, coats and extra layers of clothing went to cover the ones in need.

A girl I knew well, a nice girl, a popular girl, a girl who went to church piously and later married in the temple, a virtuous girl, from pillars of community who would aspire to pillar-hood herself,  with perfect 80’s feathered hair perfection tapped me on the shoulder and blinked her big blue innocent eyes at me and I noticed a sparkle that looked hungry and I heard her say in her loud clear varsity cheerleading voice “Is anyone else dead?”

I looked at her and resisted the urge to slap that hungry sparkle off of her face because my friend was screaming below me, she heard and wanted to know who was dead. I lied for the millionth time that night so she would lie still and not claw and struggle to stand, her strangely bent body straining painfully gave in to my fiction an I added another since I was already in to this reality I had painted.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

She was relatively calm until the ambulance took her away with the remaining injured.

Once we were off the clock, we unraveled and the hours of keeping it together melted and we shook and screamed and clung to whoever was there, clung to them like life-rafts.

The rest was a blur of tears and shock as all of us were forced to attend the prom in some idea of us needing to be together, a dans macabre of an extreme nature as people in formalwear wept under streamers. I found my prom picture from that night, I look like a zombie, with a blank dis-associative stare and my date looks sweaty and uncomfortable, like he wanted to run. The prom queen was in intensive care, the prom court dance was a circle of people sobbing. I remember hating anyone I saw having any sort of fun and I hated each anew months later when the yearbook came out and I saw pictures of anyone kissing or smiling.

The last time I saw the Best Athlete was at the yearbook signing, she had been in the hospital all summer, we weren’t told how to see her in fact we had been told she didn’t get visitors, neither did our Assistant Yearbook Editor, he was in a coma for along time and then had rehab. He was in my class and Senior year for us was strange and sad, he wasn’t the same and he knew it and was sometimes angry. He went from being bookish and nerdy to being a cholo and wearing a bandanna on his head and talking slang and his eyes were not the same intelligent eyes but dull and angry and so sad.

The saddest shade blue I have ever seen.

 He was able to sign my yearbook but it didn’t make a lot of sense and his handwriting was shaky but it was the closest to how he used to be and never will be again. His other self.

She signed my yearbook just her senior picture with “Love, _______” her name. I never saw her again. I think about her often, I wonder what happened to her, I knew she had lost her athletic scholarship. A reminder of the first lesson about guarantees and their fickleness, I suppose.

There were lawsuits and surgeries and a funeral. I learned things about friends and greed I can never un-know. It still makes me sad.

There was a brief rural legend that THE DUMPER ran to my friend TRIUMPHANT and held her in his arms as she died, which made a lot of us who knew the truth rather angry, I recall.

Some people stopped drinking and driving. Some for a month or two, I might be the only one who has never done it since. Ever. I will take someone’s keys in a heartbeat because I know that is all the time it takes to stop theirs or someone else’s.

My valley is filled with memories and memories of many others who died this way before and after and yet nothing seems to change.

I walked with an old friend tonight in the dusky hours down a hill and around a bend and she pointed and said “Cow Hollow just isn’t the same, the grass is long and no one takes care of it.” 

I realized I never made it there that night of hard lessons and I had never been there since, it looked small. Barely a park.

I never spoke to the nice pillar of the community girl with the hungry sparkle again, which is hard to do in a small high school of less than 300 but I knew I had nothing to say that was nice to nice girl so I said nothing. 

Tonight my friend told me a tale and part of the tale told of nice girl’s compassion in recent years and tonight I chose to forgive her words and her hungry sparkle.

Tonight I drove down Ivanhoe Road at night for the first time in 27 years, I wasn’t sure if I would know the spot until the strong sense of panic washed over me and my breath came faster and I gripped the wheel even though I had slowed down to maybe 20 miles per hour. Then it was gone. 
The dread about that road. 
The anger toward hungry sparkle. 
The fear of driving at night left about ten years ago. 
The nightmares are only every few years now.  


I see now I will have my life to learn all the lessons from that night, a new one washed over me as I went on a walk later with my dog to try and wrap my head around finally writing this story.

Lesson Four: Time does not heal all wounds but the scars are almost invisible except in certain light.

Tonight I said hello to an old friend and goodbye to some old feelings that I no longer need and the stars in the sky look especially bright for some reason and I think this story is done, finally and the book can close it’s tattered cover and rest. 


I hope others will share this story with anyone they thinks needs to hear it. If this story stops one person from driving drunk or getting in a car with someone or gives them the courage to take those keys, well it is still not worth living the story but it will feel a little less wasteful.
Peace.

A Night On The Town!!

Last night I drove to the town of Emmett Idaho to meet with someone I haven’t seen since 1980 or so, we went to junior high together for a year before I moved in with my dad and re-acquainted recently over Face-meh-book and discovered we have something in common besides Hillside Jr. High—we are both LIBERALS *GASP * ((cue ominous music))

In a way it is a little like a scene from Logan’s Run where Logan finds someone else  who is over 29  and who’s life jewel has gone out *Ally* ((Look around)) *Whisper *  ((RUN!!!))

SANCTUARY!!

Well, not quite but I am known for an active imagination.

It gets a little lonely in my head.

Out here, it’s very quiet. Just me and some birds.

Real ones, not the angry ones.

So back to the story.

Emmett Idaho is about 30+ miles from where my family lives, it’s nestled in a valley and surrounded by a lot of fruit orchards, the occasional hop field (Where the beer fairy gets beer from, don’t you know) and random dairy farm. When I set out on my trip, I of course checked the yahoo map to make sure I was going to the right place, I hadn’t been to Emmett since the 2^nd grade for a field trip to an apple orchard. I don’t know why I felt the city person’s need to check technology, like all the places out here, there are many signs to tell you where to go, you just look for arrows labeled “Emmett” and take it from there, silly me.

I had forgotten something about this valley and it didn’t hit me until I turned onto rural route 72 that I HAD been here one other time, my mid 20’s on a motorcycle ride with a boyfriend from my high school days, we went skinny dipping one hot summer afternoon out in a secret swimming hole.  We had a summer fling and he wanted to follow me to the city and I that’s when realized it was only a fling to me. 

I broke his heart and went back to my city life then forgot our romantic outing until this moment.

Amazed at my poor memory and callousness, I drove on and wondered if he remembered that day.

Coincidentally, I had just run into him the other day while standing on a corner talking to an old friend from high school, a truck drove by and the driver made eye contact with me and said my old name.

It was him.

He is married now with kids and a camper and a boat, no hair and smile lines around his big brown eyes. I have always been a sucker for big brown puppy dog eyes. 

They say you can’t escape your past and in a small town it is especially true, your past can drive or walk by at any moment.

But back to the present, or at least back to last night.

I make my way to Emmett driving down memory lane and then taking a left at the light to the karaoke bar. My friend and her boyfriend were going to meet me there after the cherry festival bands stopped playing and I was excited to go in and sing some songs on my own, I love karaoke and will go to bars in LA by myself and sing the night away.

I walk in and am hit by a wall of cigarette smoke. Of course, independent Idahoans would not allow a government law telling them where to smoke, how could I have forgotten?

I find a stool at the bar near the open door and order a gin and tonic.

The bartender is dressed in a black shirt and tie with a cute porkpie hat and a ponytail, he looks like a guy I know in LA, he stands out in the crowd of flannel shirts (men and women), baseball hats (men and women), and moustaches (men and women). The bartender looks at me in that Idaho way that says “hello stranger, you aren’t from these parts, are you?” all in a glance, I am familiar with that glance, something about 25 years of city living has marked me and even when I try and blend in, I am not from here to them so I don’t try anymore. He then hands me my gin and tonic ($3.50, suck it Los Angeles!)which brings tears to my eyes and not because of the price but because it is basically a tumbler full of gin with a tiny splash of tonic. I sign up to sing some Patsy Cline and a little Dolly Parton, order a coke to help me gag down my drink and survey my surroundings.

So much flannel. I notice people noticing me, not staring but that glance and I feel a feeling I have not felt in a long time, that feeling of being the Lone Asian.

Like the Lone Ranger but less heroic.

It’s not a bad feeling just one I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Sort of like being the two-headed calf at the Boise History Museum you know people are looking but you’re used to it, it’s as natural feeling as the second head.

My name is called, well, sort of she pronounces it “Po-zhjoe” and I hear echoes of

“Po-zhjoe?”  

“Po-zhjoe?”  

“Po-zhjoe?”

“Po-zhjoe?”

 As I walk up to the tiny lighted stage with brown shag carpeted walls. The two-headed “Po-zhjoe” sings and I feel another familiar feeling, the one that transcends species or heads I know my voice is good and I know it is always surprising for people to hear a soulful country belt come out of my two headed cow Asian person.  It is a magical spell I always enjoy casting. I leave the stage to applause and now it’s “Po-zhjoe!!”

Now here is where my night gets interesting.

As I head back to my stool near the precious oxygen of the open door, I see an enormous bear shaped-man has taken my seat and put my coat on the bar. I think to myself “Oh, boy.” Try and look friendly but not too friendly and reach for my drink and my coke-down-the-drink-soda and say “Excuse me” meanwhile another man, much thinner with a leathery quality sits down to my left so I am basically the filling in a very awkward sandwich.  The bear man lets me know he has rescued my coat from the floor and I thank him. I move to leave and he and his buddy say “Sit, sit, we’re all friends!”

So I sit.

I introduce myself to them, the mountainesque fella is named Dave and his friend mumbles so much I can’t tell what his name is so I will call him Mumbly for our purposes. Dave goes to talk to someone and Mumbly and I begin to chat, we talk about rodeos, how Nyssa’s really sucks now “They just don’t have the draw anymore, they can’t afford a carnival.” says Mumbly and he feels Vale has one of the best rodeos. I tell him I haven’t been to Emmett since I was a kid and he talks about how pretty it used to be and how it is full of lead and poison nowadays, I am beginning to like Mumbly, his teeth like a fine aged oak, he cares for the environment, has good taste in rodeos and I can tell he loves his town. 

I notice over his shoulder a booth of very drunk women with matching blonde over processed long hair and tight, tight jeans of varying sizes.

The drunkest and tiniest is wearing a tiny tube top and I realize she has “The Look”.

Now to folks not from the region, “The Look” is when a person is boozed up and wants to indulge in one of the more popular sports in our area, a fight.

Yes, women enjoy fist-fights as much as men and in my wild youth I admit I did indulge in a few.

More than a few, to be totally honest.

I haven’t been in a fist fight since 1985 when my most excellent right hook downed an intruder in my dorm who had just attacked a friend, to the impressed cheers of all the Alaskan boys who watched. I took a vow of non-violence shortly afterward but I am well acquainted with “The Look”

I hear her slur to her friends “No one will fight me” and make a mental note to steer clear of Slurry-Tube-Top.

Dave comes back and smiles at me and I smile back, he says the words every girl longs to hear in a bar “So, are you a lesbian, or what?” I am tempted to lie and say “Yup, Dave” and tell him some tale of my wife and our cats or to confuse him with my stock answer of “Well, I like dorky boyish men and dorky boyish women, but mostly I like the men” but that would probably just confuse him and who knows how Dave feels about lesbians or the ambisexual, so I keep it simple and go with “Or what.” and laugh "HAHAHAHAHA!" 

Dave smiles and after a brief pause pulls out his best line of the night “Are you a man?” and I say “Well, you ARE a smooth one, Dave! Does that line get you a lot of action?” He gives me his suave look and grins his textured British-tribute-toothed grin and says “Well I figured I should find out before I ask you to dance.”

Now who can turn down a line like that?

Certainly not this hippy, that’s for sure.

So Dave takes my hand in his meaty paw and leads/drags me to the dance floor, which is really a small space beside the pool table and we swing dance. Dance is a loose term, it is more like he swings me about while music plays and slams me roughly into his island-like-torso, my spleen groans and my spine threatens to herniated but I manage to smile and look somewhat graceful as we play a sort of musically accompanied person-and-bumper-car performance piece. 

I wonder if I might have whiplash as the music ends and I stagger back to my stool with Dave to rejoin my awkward sandwich.

Mumbly is there and all is right with the world until Slurry-Tube-Top gets a look in her eye and weaves her way over to Mumbly and though he and I are sitting very close, she shoves her ass in between us and leans into his face to rub his neck and whisper sweet nothings into his ear as she burns me with her cigarette, I brace my feet on the stool and lean as far as I can to give her denim-strangled-buttocks more room which of course makes Dave think I want to ride the Matterhorn. 

I am literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

I realize that all of these people are friends with my friends who have yet to show up, so I curb my instinct to tell Slurry-Tube-Top to get her butthole off of my arm and stop burning me with her smokes and instead grab my drinks and slide out and into an empty booth. “VICTORY!” I think to myself as I slide into slightly less smoky-burny-horny-creepy seating.

SANCTUARY!!

I relax and look again at the room, I see an enormous woman slow dancing with her tiny leathery boyfriend and they look happy and in love, I am jealous.

I wonder if I will ever be in love again, will I dance in smooth rhythm with someone and have him look at me like this tiny man looks at his lady. 

I sigh and gag down my drink.

I see the booth next to mine filled with patrons in their 80’s matching flannel, moustaches and ball caps men and women sharing a pitcher. A woman sings “Me and Bobby McGee” and I feel connected to my fellow patrons as we all wince in pain and clap politely, acknowledging that she did her best and grateful it’s over as is the way of karaoke.  I think of  all the short stories, plays and screenplays this night is inspiring when the other bartender, a beautiful Latina woman with that efficient calm that all female bartenders over 40 seem to have no matter what town or city comes and asks me if I need a refill, I ask for another coke and when she brings it back she refuses my money. Dave waves at me and smiles his mosaic smile and I realize he has given me a gift. He slides into the booth and we start chatting awkwardly when Slurry-Tube-Top walks by and asks for a light. Dave invites her to join us and the thought of being trapped next to her ass and penchant for burning me is more than I can bear. I tell her I am about to go up and sing and I need to sit on the outside “I’m naaaaaah gonnna to fuckin’ get trapped in that hoooooooooole back there!” she slurs at me and tries to shove her ass into the booth onto my lap and force me over. I repeat myself, then just get up and take my drink back to the bar.

An hour has gone by and I consider that it has been one of the most action packed nights I have had in a while.

My friend arrives with her boyfriend in tow and they are wearing tie-dye and I cannot tell you how happy it made me. It’s the simple things. 

SANCTUARY!!

Oh, Tie-dye what a sight for sore eyes!

We start chatting away and then it is that thing that occurs when you talk a lot with a person online and then meet them IRL and the only difference is you are hearing each other’s voices, I am totally at ease. Her boyfriend is equally warm and witty and we have ourselves a great chat. As I suspected they know Dave and Slurry-Tube-Top, I don’t know about Mumbly as he and Slurry had some sort of falling out and he left, seemingly to get away from her.

Like I said, I like the way Mumbly thinks.

We talk, laugh, sing and are the last ones out of the bar and as I drive home I think about the night, how things are not always what they seem, we are indeed all connected and if you get past a wary glance you sometimes make friends. Though I doubt Slurry-Tank-Top and I will ever be close and Dave is moving to Tri-Cities so our great romance will never begin.

 I am coming home for a longer stay in the fall and you can bet I will be making that memorable drive again.

Country roads really do take you home.